Posts from October 2007

October 16, 2007

part ofParticipatory Dissent: Debates in Performance@The Western Front303 East 8th AvenueVancouver, British ColumbiaCanada V5T 1S1 Western Front Performance Art is pleased to present Participatory Dissent: Debates in Performance, an encounter between traditional forms of performance art (endurance/duration) and new forms of social practice and intervention. Produced in conjunction with the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, the program looks to the overlaps between practices, modes of thinking, and opinions about contemporary performance. Viewers are invited to participate, enjoy and intervene in four days of individual performance art, social intervention, and discussion surrounding performance art practices that forge new relationships between artists, site and community. Facilitating the creation of new work by artists from across Europe and North America, Participatory Dissent: Debates in Performance will consist of individual and collaborative works (situated at the Western Front, online, and in various outdoor locations in Vancouver), online discussions, a round-table discussion event at the Western Front and a panel discussion at Emily Carr Institute. Works will address public intervention, alternative economies, the limits of the body, and cultures of fear in the post 9/11 era. This series of events is organized by Western Front Performance Art Guest Curator Natalie Loveless(invited by iKatun).

As
part of the ongoing Free Money project, I will be making appointments to
meet people in cafés and give them money in Vancouver on October 18-19.
Meetings will last approximately a half hour, and will take place
between 1pm and 5pm on those days. If you're in Vancouver and would
like to participate, please email me (freemoney@freemoneyrelease.org) and we'll set up a time.

In "File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints" (Education
page, Oct. 10)*[see below], Students for Free Culture is portrayed as an
organization that promotes the illegal consumption of music and movies
free of cost. In fact, we deeply believe that authors and creators
should be compensated for their work, and we are eager to promote ways
to do so in an environment where the world can build upon their
creations.

For example, an author may release a book under a
free copyright license, spurring on sales, or a band may allow fans to
share and remix their songs, selling out concerts as a result.

We
stand for a culture where everyone has the right to participate and
where works are made available for all to legitimately access, share
and remix. This is a culture that is "free as in speech" — not
necessarily one that is free of charge.

When Zachary McCune, a student at Brown, received an e-mail message
from the university telling him he might have broken the law by
downloading copyrighted songs, his eyes glazed over the warning and he
quickly forgot about it. "I already knew what they'd say about
file-sharing," he said. "It's become a campus cliché."

But the next day, he realized the message had an attachment from the Recording Industry Association of America,
a trade group that is coordinating legal efforts by record companies to
crack down on Internet piracy. The attachment told Mr. McCune he faced
a lawsuit with potential fines of $750 to $150,000 for every illegally
downloaded song.

"I was stunned by the extremity of the
punishment for taking songs I could have bought for a few cents," he
said. "It seemed grossly out of proportion."

Twelve Brown
students received these letters; Mr. McCune ended up paying $3,000 to
settle the claim. But the experience made him interested in changing
intellectual property regulations. Last spring he co-founded Brown's
chapter of Students for Free Culture, a national organization sprouting
up on college campuses that advocates loosening the restrictions of
copyright law so that information — from software to music to research
to art — can be freely shared.

"The technology has outpaced the law," said Mr. McCune, who is now a sophomore.

Established
at Swarthmore College in 2004, the group has chapters at more than 35
universities across the country. "We will listen to free music, look at
free art, watch free film and read free books," reads its manifesto,
posted on its Web site, freeculture.org. "We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism."

Members
assert that the Internet has made it necessary to rethink copyright
law, and they talk about the group's goals with something like the
reverence that earlier generations displayed in talking about social or
racial equality.

"People wonder why college students aren't
rallying more around the Iraq war," Mr. McCune said. "If there were a
draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this
cause because we're the ones bearing the burden."

Opposition
to the music industry and its efforts to protect copyrights often
dominates discussions on campuses. Chapters have organized
demonstrations in front of major record stores and held "iPod liberation" parties where students have downloaded software together that makes it possible to swap songs.

Many
chapters have held forums to discuss legal decisions and developments
in copyright, frequently debating what it means to "steal" something as
amorphous as a digital file.

But in recent months, the group
has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first
national conference, held at Harvard
in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave
presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished
countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.

"File-sharing
may have brought these issues to public consciousness, but it’s not our
only inspiration," said Elizabeth Stark, founder of Harvard's Free
Culture group.

Some chapters have rallied around the Federal
Research Public Access Act, a bill that would make it mandatory for
government-financed research to be published in online journals, free
to the public.

The movement is not without its critics. Early on,
Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet
and Societyat Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more
consequential problems to rally around than access to music.

"Part
of what's so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access
to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to
medicine," he said. "The movement does itself a disservice by blending
all the issues together."

There are student dissenters, too. At
Brown, David Harrington, a senior who did not join the new chapter,
said he sometimes felt like the "grumpiest, curmudgeonliest old man in
the conversation" for understanding the position of the recording
industry.

"I'm a musician, so I'm thinking, how are these
artists going to earn a living?" he said. "The technology makes
stealing so easy that it's hard to tell whether this debate is about
ethics or just convenience."

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the
recording industry group, said he had never heard of Students for Free
Culture. But he said his group did not plan to let up on its efforts to
protect music copyrights.

"Some say illegal downloading
couldn't possibly hurt successful artists, which may very well be
true," he said. "But we rely on a few successful artists to compensate
for all the new, risky ones who don’t recoup what’s invested in them."

Propelled by their victory, the students started the group, which they named after the 2004 book "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig,
a professor at Stanford Law School. The book applies principles from
the so-called free software movement — the idea that computer users
should have the liberty to copy, distribute and modify software as they
wish — to all aspects of culture. Too many copyright restrictions, Mr.
Lessig argued, dampen creativity.

"I wouldn't say it's a bible, but we do often reference it," said Fred
Benenson, 23, president of the group and a master's student in N.Y.U.'s
Interactive Telecommunications Program. His group has held lectures,
protests and an art exhibition, with all work licensed under Creative
Commons, a nonprofit organization that allows authors to change
copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved" or "No Rights Reserved."

There are around 15 regular members in
N.Y.U.'s chapter, Mr. Benenson said, and the mailing list includes more
than 600 people. He said he and others were working on composing a list
of the top 10 universities with the most restrictive policies for
licensing scholarly research, software and student work.

"Students
want to know which universities are going to take away their freedom on
the Internet," he said. "The academy is meant to be this wonderful,
separate part of the world that exists for the sharing and reusing of
culture."

ARTrageous, which runs September through December, is an event created by Bloomingdales, in collaboration with the New Museum of Contemporary Art
and Vanity Fair, to
bring fashion and artists together. Participating artists include:
Michelle Handelman, Hermann Nitsch, Mika Ninagawa, Jason Hackenwerth,
and Jean Claude Wouters. . Michelle Handelman's work will be featured in the windows of Bloomingdale's for two weeks in October along with Bloomingdale's
Y.E.S. Collection. Inspired by classic myths, '60s trash cinema, and pop aesthetics, Handelman makes confrontational works that explore the sublime in its various
forms of excess and nothingness.

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street
Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore's
name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people
they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize
should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama
bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden
once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks
about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly
it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people
chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House.
Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President
Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe,
largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy
from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved
himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best
president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of
Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The
worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is
that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the
threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he
warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose
a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from
Saddam." And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than
personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental
blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the
messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human
activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For
conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We
have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said
F.D.R. "We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply
perfectly to climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and
especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce
emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each
individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to
the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The
solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is
to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this
case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas
emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by
requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the
same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the
U.S. "cap and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has
been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is,
however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are
global. The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from coal
burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air
comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal
burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of
coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new
taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations
in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything
I've just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a
Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged
these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means
believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means
believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with
them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t
be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected,
and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business
Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA
researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades
ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George
Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr.
Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He's taken everything
they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible,
than ever. And it drives them crazy.

Buffalo, NY - Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal charges of "mail fraud" and "wire fraud" in a surreal post-PATRIOT Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.

"From the beginning, this has been a persecution, not a prosecution. Although I have not seen the final agreement, the initial versions contained incorrect and irrelevant information," said Dr. Dianne Raeke Ferrell, Dr. Ferrell's wife and an Associate Professor of Special Education and Clinical Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. "Bob is a 27 year survivor of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
which has reoccurred numerous times. He has also had malignant melanoma. Since this whole nightmare began, Bob has had two minor strokes and a major stroke which required months of rehabilitation."

Dr. Ferrell added that her husband was indicted just as he was preparing to undergo a painful and dangerous autologous stem cell transplant, the second in 7 years.

The Ferrells' daughter, Gentry Chandler Ferrell, added: "Our family has struggled with an intense uncertainty about physical, emotional and financial health for a long time. Agreeing to a plea deal is a small way for dad to try to eliminate one of those uncertainties and hold on a little longer to the career he worked so hard to develop... Sadly, while institutions merely are tarnished from needless litigation, individuals are torn apart. I remain unable to wrap my mind around the absurdity of the government's pursuit of this case and I am saddened that it has been dragged out to the point where my dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion." (To read Gentry Ferrell's full statement, please visit:http://caedefensefund.org/press/ferrellplea.html)

Dr. Ferrell's colleague Dr. Steven Kurtz, founder of the internationally acclaimed art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, was illegally detained and accused of "bioterrorism" by the U.S. government in 2004 stemming from his acquisition from Dr. Ferrell of harmless bacteria used in several of Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects. After a costly investigation lasting several months and failing to provide any evidence of "bioterrorism," the Department of Justice instead brought charges of "mail fraud" and "wire fraud" against Kurtz and Ferrell. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum penalty for these charges has increased from 5 years to 20. (For more information about the case, please see "Background to the Case" below or http://caedefensefund.org)

JURIDICAL ART CRITICISM?
The government is vigorously attempting to prosecute two defendants in a case where no one has been injured, and no one has been defrauded. The materials found in Dr. Kurtz's house were obtained legally and used safely by the artist. After three and a half years of investigation and prosecution, the case still revolves around $256 worth of common science research materials that were used in art works by a highly visible and respected group of artists. These art works were commissioned and hosted by cultural institutions worldwide where they had been safely displayed in museums and galleries with absolutely no risk to the public.

The Government has consistently framed this case as an issue of public safety, but the materials used by Critical Art Ensemble are widely available, can be purchased by anyone from High School science supply catalogues, and are regularly mailed.

PROFESSORS OF ART & SCIENCE EXPRESS ALARM
"The government's prosecution is an ill-conceived and misguided attack on the scientific and artistic communities," said Dr. Richard Gronostajski, Professor of Biochemistry at SUNY Buffalo, where Professor Kurtz also teaches. "It could have a chilling effect on future scientific research collaborations, and harm teaching efforts and interactions between scientists, educators and artists."

"It's deeply alarming that the government could pressure someone of Dr. Ferrell's stature into agreeing to something like this. The case threatens all Americans' Constitutionally guaranteed right to question the actions of their government," said Igor Vamos, Professor of Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

PLEA COMES AMIDST OVERWHELMING PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR DEFENDANTS
The plea bargain agreement comes at a time of overwhelming public support for the two defendants. A film about the case, Strange Culture - directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and featuring Tilda Swinton (Chronicles of Narnia, Michael Clayton), Thomas Jay Ryan (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin Brockovich) - has drawn widespread critical praise and public
interest, with screenings in dozens of U.S. cities after its selection to open both the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival documentary section. An October 1 screening of the film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City drew a crowd of 400 who stayed for an hour afterward for a discussion with Professor Kurtz, director Hershman Leeson, and actress Tilda Swinton. Special benefit screenings of the
film in numerous cities have raised thousands of dollars to offset the two defendants' escalating legal costs.

BACKGROUND TO THE CASE
The legal nightmare of renowned scientist Dr. Robert Ferrell and artist and professor Dr. Steven Kurtz began in May 2004. Professor Kurtz and his late wife Hope were founding members of the internationally exhibited art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble. Over the past decade cultural institutions worldwide have commissioned and hosted Critical Art Ensemble's participatory theater projects that help the general public understand biotechnology and the many issues surrounding it. In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing a project examining genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Detectives who responded to Professor Kurtz's 911 call deemed the couple's art suspicious, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was illegally detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife's body.

CASE DEPLETES PUBLIC AND PRIVATE RESOURCES
The government has pursued this case relentlessly for three and a half years, spending enormous amounts of public resources. Most significantly, the legal battle has exhausted the financial, emotional, and physical resources of Ferrell and Kurtz; as well as their families and supporters. The professional and personal lives of both defendants have suffered tremendously. A trial date has not yet been established.